303 Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition of new work by Jacob Kassay.

Whether walking up the stairs or reaching in the cabinet, through the daily repetition of the same surroundings, domestic space is where haptic sense develops then sediments, conditioning the body’s motor skills to automatically navigate and interface without assessing its environment. Kassay's new sculptures explore these systems in which architecture both latently shapes and eludes conscious sense. This rote coding of gestures causes the awareness of one’s surroundings to slowly erode, with familiarity superseding reflection. Thickening the peripheral features and interstices of interior space that are routinely used but disregarded, Kassay reframes how attention is built into its surroundings.

Three architectonic sculptures within the exhibition terminate in dead ends and reroute one’s circulation through the gallery. Modeled on separate stairwells at 1:1 scale, these works present corridors whose connective function is severed, neither ascending nor descending. These disconnected passages form a series of transitions that hover in an architectural uncanny, somewhere between model and fragment, calculated rendering and lived space.

Railings are affixed along the gallery wall, framing it as a transited space. These supports are lined with Braille characters without syntax, extruding the eponymous letters of the exhibition - H for one, L for the other. This fixed-scale language communicates nothing other than prehensible vocalizations: embedded sighs and inaudible drones which trail off into space.

Jacob Kassay was born in 1984 in Lewiston, New York. In 2017, his work will be the subject of a solo project at Albright Knox, Buffalo NY, curated by Cathleen Chaffee. Past solo presentations have been held at The Kitchen, New York; The Power Station, Dallas; and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. He has been included in group exhibitions at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; Fondation Richard, Paris; Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; FRAC Poitou-Charenetes, Angoulême; and Kunsthalle Andratx, Mallorca. Kassay's work was part of the 8th Gwangju Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni; and the 2010 White Columns Annual, curated by Bob Nickas. His work can be found in public and museum collections, including Boston Museum of Fine Arts; FRAC Poitou-Charenetes, Angoulême; and Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar. Kassay lives and works in Los Angeles.

Sensorial Perspectives is a collective exhibition that spans painting, photography, and mixed-media, all in the service of exploring art as something more than simply a visual medium. This experimentation can be seen in portraits in which realistic draftsmanship and neon colors have a playful back-and-forth, or photographs that present the world from the point of view of someone always in motion. Sound, touch, and motion are all evoked. Landscapes of the Mind collects six of the most innovative landscape artists working today from around the world. Through their eyes, mountains become textures slashes of saturated color, birds become lightning-quick dabs in the sky, and shadowy trees become stand-ins for people. Through oil, acrylic, photography, and spray paint, these artists seek to forge a different kind of map. The natural world and its animal inhabitants have never been portrayed with such empathy and imagination.

Both exhibitions begin December 3, 2016 and run through December 23, 2016 with a joint opening reception on December 8 from 6-8 pm. Entrance is free.

Agora Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery located in the heart of Chelsea’s fine art district in New York. Established in 1984, Agora Gallery specializes in connecting art dealers and collectors with national and international artists. The art gallery’s expert consultants are available to assist corporate and private clients in procuring original artwork to meet their organization’s specific needs and budget requirements. With a strong online presence and popular online gallery, ARTmine, coupled with the spacious and elegant physical gallery space, the work of our talented artists, who work in diverse media and styles, can receive the attention it deserves. Over the years Agora Gallery has sponsored and catered to special events aimed at fostering social awareness and promoting the use of art to help those in need.

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

–Walt Whitman, “I Sit And Look Out” from Leaves of Grass

St. John’s sustained commitment to observing and re-presenting experiences of the everyday is framed in this exhibition by Walt Whitman and his groundbreaking work Leaves of Grass, originally published in 1855 and continually reworked by Whitman until his death in 1892. In referencing Leaves of Grass, St. John evokes a vision of democracy that expands beyond politics to a way of life.

In this context, the works in the exhibition convey an acceptance of the multitude of subjectivities in America, as well as a personal responsibility to participate in the socio-cultural realm. Connecting a lineage from the Ashcan School artists to Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, St. John gathers source materials by casting an inclusive and penetrating gaze on the world through which he moves, from billboard advertisements to the Internet. Underlying his insightful and rigorous formal practice is an urgency that reflects today’s heightened state of information exchange.

Creating palimpsests by harnessing such cultural fragments as corporate logos, handwritten lost item signs, red-white-and-blue political stickers, found images of celebrities, and spray-painted graffiti, St. John draws stimulating connections that kindle new perspectives on contemporary culture. While the construction panel paintings act as communicative territories of society at large, the lamp posts foreground the voice of the individual. Against the backdrop of omnipresent marketing, St. John seeks to commemorate actual lives lived by inviting prolonged attention to society’s intimate remains: an abandoned shoe, spilled newspapers, expired words.

Employing diverse methods to destabilize the separation between art and the world outside the studio or gallery space, St. John reinforces the relevance of art within a broader cultural discourse. In the final room of the exhibition St. John has gathered a selection of works by other artists: Leo Gabin, Nate Lowman, Thomas McDonell, Alex McQuilkin, Lanier Meaders, Pope.L, Borna Sammak, Dirk Skreber, and Andy Warhol. In the past, exhibiting work by his peers gestured towards the importance of dialogue, which is a sustaining force within a community of artists. Here, with the inclusion of a Warhol Brillo Box in particular, the works appear as objets petits a—discrete, even unattainable objects—emphasizing St. John’s interest in interrogating the value ascribed to the range of cultural artifacts.

Coinciding with a critical moment in American culture and politics today, St. John’s invocation of Whitman’s notion of democracy is not to suggest it has been realized; in the final room of the exhibition a collage titled “in the days of 49” juxtaposes a Walker Evans Depression-era photograph with an image of American model Kate Upton—a reminder of prevailing inequality and indifference. While evading didacticism, St. John retains a sense of purpose and hope within his work. In ushering the viewer into an encounter with facets of society that often elude scrutiny, he creates a space to more critically and compassionately consider the world.

These Days; Leaves of Grass is Michael St. John’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. Michael St. John lives and works in Sheffield, Massachusetts. This will be St. John's 14th solo exhibition in New York since 1990, including an exhibition at Karma in 2013, for which a major monograph was concurrently published. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions across the United States. Along with an extensive resume of curatorships, St. John has held several teaching positions.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted by a singular, outstretched figure, cloaked by a highly reflective emergency blanket. First presented as part of the 13th Biennale de Lyon, 2015, the work was cast by Weber from a person lying under an emergency blanket. This surface, which itself is a simulation of metal, was realized in solid bronze, later coated in aluminum through a process that turns plastic foils into metal ones - in effect, replicating the sources’ original mimicry, and creating a tautological relationship between the original and its copy. Placed on top of a real yoga mat, the work sinks into the soft surface with its weight, and begins to unveil its contradictions – the materials of leisure confronted with those of disaster, and the simulation of fragility made solid.

This circular logic is furthered by the appearance of the work’s surface, achieved in collaboration with Klobe, a German corporation that first developed the material now used for contemporary emergency blankets during World War II. Originally used within searchlights, the shimmering surface now highlights the sensual qualities of the blanket’s folds, which conflicts the works references made familiar by the current news cycle and ongoing refugee crises. Likening this drapery to classical sculpture, the work simultaneously challenges, and participates within a dialogue surrounding the aestheticization of disaster.

Diverse in its approach and materials, Pádraig Timoney’s work blends and mutates styles as he moves between painting, photography, and installation. Despite the visually distinct results, at the work’s core is a focused inquiry into the mechanics of images. Timoney conversely works in both directions - creating new images from abstractions (the captivating results of processes achieved in the studio), or rebuilding them part-by-part from photographs or observation. In each, he acknowledges the inherent flaws of these constructions, from the faultiness of recognition, the errors of translation, and further, the subjectivity of both viewers and the artist.

These in turn become generative openings in Timoney’s work as they are distanced from their original context. The images exist within thrilling, new visual constellations, allowing for the introduction of artifice and illusion, and the question of not only what they depict, but why? Each work records an index of decisions that determine its final state, materially and cognitively, displaying a history that is intentionally left open-ended. Figuration appears to hover only a hair away from abstraction, as if the movement of a line would cause one to collapse into the other. The narrowing of this gap suggests that the works’ initial disparate appearance may lead to an alternate understanding of their connections; a net that widens only to close anew, though what’s caught within it is left for the viewer to decide.

Padraig Timoney lives and works in Brooklyn. His work is currently on view as part of Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Centre Pompidou, Paris through March 17, 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include the Scrambled Eggs Salute The Trifle, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2016, Planxty Milano, Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Milan, 2016 a lu tiempo de..., curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Museo Madre, Naples, 2014, and Fontwell Helix Feely, Raven Row, London, 2014.

Initiated as part of the inaugural Immersion: A French American Photography Commission, a program launched by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in alliance with Aperture Foundation, Eden is the first iteration of artist Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques’s eponymous long-term project. As part of the commission, Couzinet-Jacques purchased a small, historical building in Eden, North Carolina, as a site for an immersive exploration of the ideas of property, community, and image-making. The resultant output is eclectic, incorporating Polaroids, video, traditional photographic film, found objects, historical documents, and sculptural elements—the better to articulate and grapple with the often contradictory themes of utopia and home, the inevitable gaps between representation and reality, and the work of art as a means of re-enchantment. In addition to his own visual investigations, Couzinet-Jacques invited a group of sculptors, writers, videographers, and other artists to visit Eden over the course of the year and to create work inspired by the Little Red Schoolhouse. Selections of the resulting work, including pieces from each of the participants and elements from the house itself, are interwoven as part of this ambitious building and greenhouse installation, designed in collaboration with architects Jérémie Dalin and Sylvia Bourgoin and with environmental guidance by NY Sun Works, an urban sustainability non-profit organization.

Asya Geisberg Gallery is proud to present “Jaunty Juke”, the second solo exhibition of Ricardo Gonzalez. Comprised of expressionistic paintings and an ongoing series of charcoal drawings with a focus on line and gesture, this exhibition is populated by Gonzalez’s familiar figures, drawn swiftly to represent a frenzied state. Gonzalez, a musician turned painter, connects the intuitive nature of jamming and music’s physical expression through the body to the process of drawing, as he searches to recreate that wave of pure expression in his art: a euphoric state, so concentrated as to be on the verge of collapse, and the precipice to chaos. Obsessively drawing similar motifs, the artist aims for a perfection that arrives from working nonstop at a high speed from start to finish. The apex of these experiments come with a series of frenzied works, where the figure is dispersed and recombined into a series of riffs on face, gesture, and body.

As in the artist’s earlier exhibition, black is not just the positive presence in the blank white page, but a character in and of itself, striking us with its power throughout the exhibition. Instead of the usual definition of black as the antithesis of color, its virtual absence, in “Jaunty Juke” black is as nuanced and strong as any of the chroma surrounding the work.

Gonzalez uses the limitation of the paper’s edge as an animated space that figures inhabit fully, pressing against, or running in and out, as if breaking through the theatrical fourth wall. Sinewy legs sprout oversized boots, while an elongated tubular mark evolves into three massive fingers. In more minimal compositions, one line, however brisk, suggests a whole narrative of implied action, character, and nuance. Some manic drawings show severed bodily fragments, absurdly linked, such as a hand incongruously sprouting into eyes. Influenced by outsider art, repetitive doodling, or children’s art, and Modern movements that tried to recreate the automatic nature of all of these, Gonzalez’s works suggest a fevered dream in which we only remember the most jarring elements - the evil grin, the teeth too large, the menacing hand gesture, the pure emotion rather than the details that upon morning’s reflection don’t add up. His practice of constant drawing throughout his career, whether in sketchbooks or incessant series of individual works, celebrates the nature of the medium: mark and line become synonymous with psyche, as the artist tries over and over, paradoxically, to show a lack of effort.

Ricardo Gonzalez was born in Mexico City and lives and works in New York. He received an MFA from New York University, and his BFA at New England School of Art & Design, Boston, MA and Madrid, Spain. He has exhibited in numerous venues in New York, NY, Boston, MA, Miami, FL, Berlin, Mexico, and Belgium. Recent exhibitions include UNTITLED. Miami, Galeria Talcual, Mexico City, Traneudstillingen, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Galeria W, Santiago, Chile. He is a recipient of the Martin Wong Scholarship Award in Painting, and his work has been reviewed

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 4, 2016 – Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to present 19 paintings and works on paper by Abstract Expressionist, JON SCHUELER (Milwaukee, 1916-1992). Known for his ethereal and abstracted paintings of the sky, Berry Campbell has curated an exhibition of rarely before seen figurative works from the 1960s. Many of these paintings have not been on view since an exhibition at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore in 1967. Schueler himself described these paintings as “woman emerging from landscape” and as we call them “women in the sky.” Please join us in celebration of Jon Schueler and his “women in the sky” paintings at Berry Campbell in Chelsea on Thursday, November 17 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition will run through December 23, 2016.

When Jon Schueler arrived in New York in August of 1951, he initially resided in the studio of Clyfford Still, with whom he had recently studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In New York, Schueler quickly became part of the downtown art scene. His circle of friends included Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt (who he had known in California), Raymond Parker, and Barnett Newman. Frequenting the Cedar Bar, becoming part of the Club, and imbibing the heady and adventurous spirit of the time, he created large-scale canvases, rendered gesturally with the palette knife. These were shown at the historic Stable Gallery, run by Eleanor Ward, in 1954 and at Leo Castelli’s brand new gallery in 1957 (Schueler’s was the first solo show at the gallery). Along with such artists as Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and James Brooks, Schueler became known as one of the most prominent figures in the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, who expanded abstraction in new directions, often embracing the natural world.

A turning point in Schueler’s life and art occurred in September of 1957, when he sailed for Scotland, setting up a studio in Mallaig, a small fishing village on the west coast, across from the Isle of Skye. Although Schueler had been to Scotland while serving in World War II—he was a B17 navigator, flying missions primarily over France and Germany—the catalyst for his choice had been the descriptions by a woman with whom he had a romantic relationship during the war. She had planted strong visual images “of shapes and colors” in his mind that he felt driven to pursue.1 What he wanted was “to try to understand something about nature under certain terms,” with a desire of “literally overcoming nature, getting beyond it . . . anything but accepting it.”2 In Mallaig, the sky alone became the vehicle for Schueler’s artistic journey; he discovered that for him nature was the sky and everything in life itself. A chronicle of Schueler’s experience in Mallaig is contained in The Sound of Sleat, the exhilarating narrative of his life from 1957 to 1979, edited and published after his death.3 Described in its introduction by the artist’s friend, the novelist Russell Banks, as “A Portrait of the Imagination of an American Artist,” the book is a “collage” of letters and journal entries in chronological order, yet often doubling back into memories and stories of the past (Schueler, who received a Masters in English literature from the University of Wisconsin, at one point planned to be a writer). Of his experience in Mallaig, Schueler wrote:
I studied the Mallaig sky so intently, and I found in its con-vulsive movement and change and drama such a con-centration of activity that it became all skies and even the idea of all nature to me . . . Time was there and motion was there—lands forming, seas disappearing, worlds fragmenting, colors emerging or giving birth to burning shapes, mountain snows showing . . . . I had created it—the sky and country—before I had ever left the US . . . I knew that I wanted to be living in the picture day by day, looking out to sea from the same vantage point so that the sea and sky would be there looming large as they do when looked at from across and into the edge of the land. I wanted a strip of land on the horizon so that I could watch the movement of the sky across it and study its disappearances when the sky merged with the sea.4
Schueler’s sky paintings, varying from vortexes of life and death in the balance to horizontals, intensified in their stillness, are today his best-known works.

Creating paintings cited for their resonances with those of Milton Avery, Rothko, and Willem de Kooning (Schueler would be featured in an exhibition with Avery and Rothko at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1975), Schueler participated in the dialectic interchange that characterized the art of the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, he was a romantic, a man whose art and sensibility can be seen as aligned with traditions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. It makes sense that when Still brought a portfolio of images of paintings by J.M.W. Turner to class in San Francisco, Schueler was over-whelmed and responded viscerally. He also felt an affinity with the intensity and passion in Still’s art. Schueler recalled his reaction when Still hung four of his huge paintings on the walls of his studio: “I had never seen anything like them before. Powerful images. Blood reds, scarred browns, and blacks. A flash of color. Bumps and scourges, tensely violent, like the surface of life. I didn’t know if I liked them. I was breathless with the experience.”5

The group of paintings of the female figure that Schueler created from 1962 to 1967, featured in this exhibition, surfaced initially from his scenes of Scottish skies. In December of 1957, he wrote in a journal entry of planning to depict “woman emerging from the landscape.”6 Working out his ideas in The Sound of Sleat, he mused that for him “man” was a moral force in nature as opposed to “woman,” representing “birth, earth, lust, heat, anger, sensual, evil, flesh, beauty, hope, love, comfort (?).”7 Whether conditioned by the long connection in art between women and nature or not, this link was natural to Schueler, probably because he had long wrestled with nature to probe the meaning of human existence. What he sought was to capture “sensual man of moral nature painting woman.”8 However, he did not pursue this subject until the summer of 1962, when he started a couple canvases with the figure as a basis.9 Among these was Red Snow Cloud and Blue Sky. Here an organic process seems to be taking place in which the female form has begun to materialize from inchoate nature; the artist used his brush with a sensitivity as if more to feel the subject than observe it.

Later in the summer, while on a trip to Stonington, Maine, Schueler came to the realization that he wanted to give his full attention to painting women. He described how this occurred: “I have always thought that because of my nature theme, there was nothing for me to paint in New York. Now I realize that Woman is in New York, and I can paint that with as much passion as I painted about the sky in Scotland.”10 Schueler based his images on a range of women in his life, including one or two with whom he had relationships—in particular Mary, to whom he was married briefly. Other subjects were models who passed through his studio. Nonetheless, the paintings are not of specific individuals, but means for Schueler to wrestle with his feelings about women. He wrote at one point of painting Mary “yet embracing the struggle of freeing myself from her.”11 In Mary: Reclining Nude, Schueler drew on the long tradition of reclining nudes in art, from Titian forward. Yet rather than inviting the viewer with her gaze, she tilts her head in repose; her body is in a relaxed position with her open legs providing the work’s foreground. The viewer’s eye is directed around the canvas by energetic, but thin areas of brushwork contrasted by dark paint marks creating the breasts and head. Here, and in other paintings, Schueler envisioned the figure through a landscape lens. In a journal entry in The Sound of Sleat on January 3, 1963, he wrote of a time when Mary returned to the studio after having been out. He asked “What’s happened to you, baby? You seem so small.” The entry continues: “I had lived with the Mary image on the canvas throughout the afternoon—the fantasy image, expanding as in a dream from the nearness of my eyes to her body the night before. Breasts like mountains, belly massive, thighs huge plains of flesh, a landscape red, autumn yellows, confused and convulsive.”12

Like de Kooning, Schueler used the painting process to express emotion and resolve contradictions. In 1964, he observed: “women, I make women so much a part of my life. I love them, need them, and am cursed by them. Now that I paint them, I need them all the more—although through the painting I am separate from them even as I am drawn to them.”13 Instead of the broken lines, slashing, fierce brushwork, and harsh color contrasts in de Kooning’s paintings, Schueler used sensuous contours and oil colors in both hot and cool hues, which he kept pure yet applied with soft transitions and areas of luminous translucency. His paintings express pleasure rather than anger. Schueler acknowledged using the touch of his brush as a means of feeling the “exhilaration and power” of love.14 At the same time, with the distancing of paint and canvas, he could “avoid getting caught in the honeycomb of sentimentality and guilt and abrasion—which is probably life and without which I could not paint.”15 In Sonia, Purple Hills and Blue Sky (1964), the soft movements of the artist’s brush seem to lovingly enunciate parts of the figure, which he arranged with the upward movement toward the spiritual zone in a landscape. Lemon and cadmium yellows denote sunlight falling between Sonia’s breasts, and her hair flows from the apex of the figure with water-like movement. In the painting, Sonia has become monumental with a mountain-like solidity, but her expression is private and meditative. She appears calm and restful although remote. At the same time, Schueler’s images can be related to the sexual revolution of the era, a time of new openness about issues of women’s health, physiognomy, and sexuality.

In other works of 1964, Schueler’s figures are more fully suffused into landscapes. In Sketch: Landscape and Figures, the raised knee of the woman breaks the suggestion of a horizon line and patches of color imply changing depths and heights. In Phyllis, we see the figure from below. Her form has become constellation-like, submerged into the radiant atmosphere of a heaven-like sky. The figure became even more elusive in Schueler’s images of 1965 and 1966, as he gradually pushed it back into the sky. A few glimmers of weightless figural form are present in Woman and Blue Sky (1965). In The Soft Brenda (1966), the curvature of one breast is among the few elements that distinguish figure from ground, as Schueler conveyed his response to the subject with painterly spontaneity. In Schueler’s works on paper depicting women, he often similarly turned figural form into compositional design, either simplifying a subject to a few sensitively drawn lines in crayon, as in Nude Study, II (1966) or exploiting the innate features of his mediums to create a dynamic allover surface, as in Woman Study (1966).

Having brought the female form into the forefront of his art, Schueler was able to subsume the passion and charge of the subject into land- and skyscapes, such as Summer Sky: Loch Eishort (New York) (1966) and North of Ullapool (1967). Nature and the female figure served a similar purpose for Schueler, providing vehicles for his romantic yearning to feel the full power of what it means to be alive through art.

Schueler was married five times, but it was his last marriage to Magda Salvesen, a Scottish art historian that lasted.16 The two met in 1970, were married in 1976, and she was his ballast until he died at age 75 on August 5, 1992, shortly before his 76th birthday on September 12. Schueler and Salvesen lived in Mallaig almost entirely between 1970 and 1975, when they moved back to New York. Many solo shows of Schueler’s art were held from the 1960s onward in the United States and Scotland, including two at the Stable Gallery (1961 and 1963), a retrospective at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, in 1967 (including many paintings from his woman series), the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh (1971), Edinburgh College of Art (1973), and exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York (1986, 1987, 1989, 1991), the Dorothy Rosenthal Gallery, Chicago (1981, 1984), and the Dorry Gates Gallery, Kansas City (1982, 1986, 1991). Posthumous exhibitions were organized by Sweet Briar College, Virginia (touring, 1999–2000), the ACA Galleries, New York (1995, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2006), the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2000, 2002, 2006), the City Art Centre, Edinburgh (touring, 2003–4), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2005–6), the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (touring, 2006–7), and the Springfield Museum of Art, Missouri (2009). In 2016 Schueler’s centenary year is being celebrated by a plethora of exhibitions. These were, or are, being held at eleven venues in Scotland and four in the United States—at Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum,
Minneapolis (group show); and Berry Campbell, New York.

Berry Campbell continues to fill an important gap in the downtown art world, showcasing the work of prominent and mid-career artists. The owners, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, share a curatorial vision of bringing new attention to the works of a selection of postwar and contemporary artists and revealing how these artists have advanced ideas and lessons in powerful and new directions. Other artists and estates represented by the gallery are Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Eric Dever, Perle Fine, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Jill Nathanson, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Albert Stadler, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, and Joyce Weinstein.

Berry Campbell Gallery is located in the heart of the Chelsea Arts District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011. www.berrycampbell.com. For information, please contact Christine Berry or Martha Campbell at 212.924.2178 or info@berrycampbell.com.

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce Trade Winds, our first solo exhibition with Hugh Scott-Douglas, featuring a new series of UV cured inkjet and resin printed canvases and a recent digital video work. Scott-Douglas works from a studio space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an urban industrial park with a long varied history of changing roles ranging from naval shipyard to film studio lot. Reflecting on this environment, he began researching the global shipping trade and found a mapping software able to track all thoroughfare of sea transport. Utilizing the capabilities of the program in a manner different from the software’s intent, Scott-Douglas isolates the environmental conditions in each location – which appear as real-time graphemes of lines, arrows, and triangles – by removing all of the boats from the water. Specific to current, wind, and wave directions, these symbols are mapping the shifting conditions of the various trade routes, and become the basis of his artworks in layers of printed ink and resin.

Throughout Scott-Douglas’s practice are motifs concerning an interest in systems of value, and the deconstruction of protocols and symbols. This can be seen in his previous series, such as: Chopped Bills and Torn Cheques (2013-2014), his folded billboard sculptures (2014) and a set of prints derived from the interior workings of watches in 2015. With his latest body of work, Scott-Douglas approaches similar queries.

Guided by a composite image of a thousand global satellites, each composition is an abstraction representing a different commercial shipping route. The individual artwork’s titles, such as Bossa Nova (a journey from Salvador, Brazil to Tangier, Morocco) refer to the names of these naval thoroughfares. The artworks are created by zooming in on a specific oceanic area and removing the naval vessels from the coded mapping system. In a multi-phase process, the artist creates aerial maps with their own individual color schemes. Then with the aid of an industrial printer, a process akin to silkscreening is employed to render each image in its layers where current, wind, and wave directions are frozen, one on top of the next, as if time has collapsed into a perpetual present.

Alongside the canvas prints, Scott-Douglas presents Shudder, a 2-minute looped, digital video that considers the measurement of an amorphous form, air. With a camera attached on top of an air compressor and aimed at the artist’s studio floor, the compressor is activated and begins to shake aggressively, creating wild gestures within the frame. Filmed also from an aerial perspective, what is experienced is the compressor filling with air in order to reach full pressure. When the compressor reaches its capacity and stops intaking air, the camera for a moment becomes still. In those few final seconds, the viewer can clearly see Scott-Douglas’ studio floor before the cycle repeats and the image becomes amorphous again. From hypnotic blur to splattered studio floor, the video documents the transition of nebulous air into controlled and measured units and imparts a tangibility to that which often goes unnoticed.

Cassina Projects and ARTUNER are pleased to announce Figure of Speech, a new exhibition opening on November 10th, 2016 at Cassina Projects. This is the second chapter of a joint exhibition programme between the two ventures.

Figure of Speech is a three-person show featuring the work of David Czupryn, Georg Herold and Katja Seib. A ‘figure of speech’ is a rhetorical device that enriches text with complex layers of significance: it can be a specific arrangement or omission of words, a particular kind of repetition, or a departure from the words’ literal meaning. Some of the most commonly used ones are simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and personification. The use of such devices often refines text by means of bringing sentiments closer to the everyday, or conversely by elevating simple experiences. This exhibition looks at the practices of three contemporary German artists affiliated with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Specifically, it explores the ways in which each of them articulates the characters within the different narratives weaved into their works. Indeed, in a way similar to the use of a figure of speech in verbal discourse, Czupryn, Herold and Seib evoke, through the protagonists of their paintings, a plethora of references and affects.

David Czupryn’s investigations of nature and artificiality merge with uncannily human emotions in his works on canvas. Personal episodes and dark stories take the shape of disquieting anthropomorphic assemblages of plants and plastics, polymers and minerals. Not interested in a faithful reproduction of nature as such, Czupryn’s alchemies mould the fantastic universes of his paintings in an illusionistic amalgamation of materials. Unlike the composite portraits by the 16th century Italian Master Giuseppe Archimboldo, upon closer inspection, Czupryn’s components – executed with hyperrealist detail – reveal themselves as unreal, non-existent, and otherworldly. The concurrent presence and absence of his characters – unnerving wallflowers quietly observing the audience – allows the artist to explore the uncanny and the unconscious.

Georg Herold is one of the most important German artists of the 20th century, best known for his sculptures made of a various range of materials – from bricks, bottles, wooden laths and underwear to bronze – as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, his caviar paintings, made by painstakingly arranging and numbering thousands of the precious black eggs on canvas. In Figure of Speech, the artist will present both his monumental humanoid bronze sculptures and the signature caviar paintings. Herold is resolved to interpreting the world according to his own canons: instead of asking questions to others, he seeks to question phenomena directly. It is essential for him to keep as unbound as possible from existing associations. Indeed, the caviar paintings are an investigation into displaced materials, into luxury and mortality, created with a substance that is simultaneously precious and degradable. The sculptures, on the other hand, embody the struggle between the maker and his creation, between desire and wish-fulfilment.

Katja Seib’s paintings delve into narrative emotions. They open like doors onto private scenes of tenderness, desire, sadness or reverie. Always somewhat mysterious, her works hold the promise of disclosing their secrets hidden in the details. They articulate ineffable feelings that are at once personal and universal. Often metaphorical, Seib’s painterly stories reflect with self-irony on the human condition in its infinite declinations. For her body of work presented in New York, unlike the one preceding it, the artist looks towards current events from the world at large, rather than at personal experiences. However, by portraying friends and people she feels close to, Seib brings such occurrences closer to an intimate dimension. Some, like the death of the legendary musician Prince, are moments that blur the boundaries between public and private, as they touch us deeply, without concerning us directly.

David Czupryn (b. 1983) is a German-born artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf. He graduated from the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (2007–2015) where he studied sculpture under Georg Herold and painting under Lucy McKenzie and Tomma Abts. His work has been shown throughout Europe including Maschinen Haus, Essen, Kunstmuseum Solingen, Düsseldorf, Londonnewcastle Projectspace and Marlborough Contemporary in London. He participated in two spotlight exhibitions in 2016 on ARTUNER. This year he won the 70th International Bergische Art Prize.

Georg Herold (b. 1947) was born in Jena, East Germany. He now lives and works in Cologne. Herold studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1974-1976) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg (1977-1978). He holds professorships in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. One of the most renowned German artists of the last thirty years, Herold has shown throughout Europe and the US since 1977. He has had solo and two person exhibitions at institutions such as at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Brandhorst, München, the Kunstverein, Freiburg and at galleries such as Max Hetzler, Berlin, CFA, Berlin, Sadie Coles, London and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. His broad oeuvre, which covers sculpture, installation, photography, painting and video, has had a major influence on artists throughout Europe.

Katja Seib (b. 1989) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany where she lives and works. She received an MFA in painting and studied as a ‘Meisterschüler’ under Professor Tomma Abts. Her work has been exhibited in several German galleries including the KIT Museum in Düsseldorf, Parkhaus Düsseldorf Gallery, Fiebach Minninger Gallery, Cologne and Londonnewcastle Projectspace in London. She took part in a 2016 spotlight exhibition on ARTUNER.

"Symbiosis, not chance mutation, is the driving force behind evolution. The cooperation between organisms and the environment are the chief agents of natural selection—not competition among individuals. Darwin’s grand vision was not wrong, only incomplete.”

Lynn Margulis, American evolutionary theorist

Without bio-mass, molecular genetics, and costly research laboratories, Karin Pliem attempts to convey her ideas and perspectives concerning the problematic relationship between man and living nature. By seducing the viewer into a massive landscape, replete with fantastical planting and vestiges of long past manufacture, She holds that man is neither more nor less than a part of nature. Symbiotic Union, Pliem’s first exhibition in the United States, invites us to enter a world of constructive communication between a polyculture society’s various living organisms. Although humankind is not depicted, we, as the viewer finalize the pictorial plane. There can be no doubt that the Artist’s views of nature are not naturalistic.

When comparing works of art and organisms, the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch notes a possible parallel between artistic and evolutionary creations. “We cannot take away or exchange some part of it without causing the most serious damage. The orientation of works of art toward consistency is perfectly analog to the biotic tendency toward the generation of optimized entities. It is in this structural sense that art always emulates nature.” Pliem’s canvas construct is broken down into panels which are united through a single-color palette and thread of decay and rebirth.

Just as with symbiotic connections between living beings from different ecosystems and regions of the world, the works in Symbiotic Union create a conversation between conceptual considerations and the painterly process. At a moment in which the painting achieves dialogue with past and present concerns, Pleim knows the work is finished. This ending process is also one that happens organically and is spurred on with the immediate beginning of the next painting in the series and so on…. her world knows more than just one symbiotic union.

Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present Classic Attitude, an exhibition of hard-edged abstract paintings from the early 1960s by Helen Lundeberg. Classic Attitude opens on Thursday, November 3rd with a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of Lundeberg’s work.

Helen Lundeberg was a leading figure of west coast abstraction in the post-war era. An active painter and writer, she was at the epicenter of a dynamic group of Los Angeles artists and critics that included Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, Jules Langsner, John McLaughlin, and Frederick Hammersley. Along with her peers, Lundeberg’s work formed the core of what later became known as California hard-edged painting. Although her contributions to American abstraction have long been recognized on the west coast, Lundeberg has yet to receive her due in the east.

In the 1960s Lundeberg created a body of work considered to be her finest and most distinct. Distilled to essential elements of line, color, and space, her hard-edged paintings from this period effect a coherence of composition that borders on the sublime. Classic Attitude presents a selection of paintings from this moment, featuring works that are united by their compositional balance, subtleties of color, and pictorial refinement. The title of the exhibition derives from a statement Lundeberg wrote for a 1942 exhibition at MoMA:

By classicism I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but a highly conscious concern with esthetic
structure which is the antithesis of intuitive, romantic, or realistic approaches to painting. My aim,
realized or not, is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in a painting with regard to its
function in the whole organization. That, I believe, is the classic attitude.[1]

Lundeberg’s attention to formal elements such as balance and color connect her to a previous generation of abstract artists, including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers. Similarly, her reductive forms, flat surfaces, and spare compositions link her to contemporaries such as Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. But unlike these other artists, Lundeberg's vision of abstraction remained connected to the world around her. In Desert Road, Lundeberg’s flat, unmodulated swaths of color coalesce to form the view suggested by the painting’s title. Dramatic landscapes and architectural vistas such as these were composed of forms remembered—things “imagined rather than 'seen,'” as she stated later in life.[2] The works presented in Classic Attitude encapsulate Lundeberg’s uniquely classic approach, and underscore her rightful place in the art historical canon.

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) was born in Chicago and graduated from Pasadena City College in 1930. She co-founded the movement Subjective Classicism, also known as Post Surrealism, before becoming an integral part of the west coast abstract circle. In spring 2016 The Laguna Art Museum presented a retrospective of her work. She has also had solo exhibitions at The Fresno Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, Long Beach Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Norton Simon Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Laguna Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Orange County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, San Diego Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, and Fresno Art Museum.

For more information please contact Candace Moeller at +1.212.594.0550 or candace@cristintierney.com.